Midsummer Mozart

St Andrews Blackadder Church, North Berwick 21/6/26

The Quorum Collective and Friends

Maureen Morrison producer

Andrew Lees conductor

George Brady horn

Waiting outside the church on sunny Midsummer evening with the strains of an ongoing hoolie just audible from the harbour, the queue was anticipating 'An Orchestral Concert of Popular Mozart, including Horn Concerto No 4’, a pleasant selection to mark the pleasant occasion. And indeed, that is what we got, but with a unique perk.

Retired cellist Maureen Morrison is known here for producing quality concerts showcasing young musicians from around the Lothians who display exceptional talent. Yet onto the sanctuary floor before us streamed a marvellously motley band of all shapes and ages, including a wizardly gentleman with a pure white waist-long beard. A chamber orchestra twenty-five strong, unusually generous for North Berwick’s church events.

First was ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, beautifully played. The element of “conversation” between the different sets of strings was nicely displayed. Pleasing too was how many of the players were smiling, clearly enjoying their evening together.

Maureen Morrison then revealed how the musicians, a mixture of professionals and serious amateurs, had never met until that afternoon. She had invited each one, friends of hers, from all walks of her life. Nonetheless, conductor Andrew Lees had skilfully conjured from them this supremely harmonious result with one brief rehearsal.

A few days earlier, messages had been sent urging people to attend, as pre-bookings were looking thin and one of the players was coming “all the way from London”. In fact he had bought a day return on the sleeper and turned out to be solo hornist George Brady. He’d been a protégé of Maureen’s while still at school. Now 18, an undergraduate at the Royal Academy of Music he has currently reached the quarter-finals of the BBC’s Young Musician competition. If he makes the finals, he will play the piece he’s giving us today, specifically the Rondo. It’s familiar to many from Flanders and Swann’s ‘Ill Wind’ where Flanders sings, to the horn’s tune, a witty ditty on his struggles with this notoriously difficult instrument.

George Brady took up position little more than a metre away from us. It was marvellous to witness so close up the precise control of his facial muscles – his embouchure. He played with warm solemnity, until reaching the Rondo, the Flanders-and-Swann movement. At this point he added to the dance of the embouchure a descant from his eyes and brows, perhaps acknowledging the humour of the Flanders skit. Close to the end he treated us to a virtuoso moment of improvisation, toying with some of the strange and comic sounds that this instrument can create.

The third item was perhaps another reference to prodigiously talented youth: ‘Symphony No. 29’, which Mozart wrote when he, like our soloist, was just 18. This completed a serene and lovely evening.

I’d not gone along to the concert intending to review, but it proved so special, it should be on record; an example not only of fine performance but of the role a small town can play in keeping great music alive. I do hope George Brady achieves the ‘Young Musician’ final and gets to play again the Rondo which he travelled 800 miles one Midsummer’s Day to try out on us.

photo credit: St Mary's Music School